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control better adapted to their appetites. Losing faith in an orderof society which had once seemed everlasting and which had promisedsuch rich harvests, they have lost faith in many other ideas anddoctrines to which, in their former docility, they clung. The mindsof men are now open to all sorts of doctrinaires, promisers, evangelistsof the good life. There has been a weakening of the normaland routine inhibitions of the old order.It has been suggested that we are witnessing a revolt against culture.I am not prepared to admit that there has been a revolt againstculture. There is at present, it is true, a vast social upheaval whichis the result of the failure not of our culture, but of the arrangementswe have made for managing our society.In societies great masses of men are moved by a deeply rooteddesire for quiet, orderliness, routine, the undisturbed round of theday's duties and distractions, the habits of the seasons, the successionof feasts, and for security. Generally they want to be left alone,whence arises the seemingly paradoxical surrender to public disciplineson what might be called the whole range of traffic. This theylook upon not so much as coercion of themselves as a restraint uponothers. Having no wish to walk on the grass or drive to the left or tooffend against any of the generally accepted understandings thatenable large numbers of people to live in a limited space withoutbothering one another unduly, they are willing that the law shouldrestrain those who itch to defy these arrangements. This trait isfound in all urban populations and, of course, nowhere so much asin Germany. There some apologists have explained the German'stolerance of the ubiquitous verboten sign as a form of the German'speculiar desire for freedom, for these disciplines leave all whoare willing to follow them free from annoyance by the minority thatwould rebel against the rules. There is something to be said for this.But it can become too much a habit of the spirit, a rule of behaviorthat after a while may subdue the mind to excessive regulation.When, therefore, governments extend too far their disciplines orfail in the generally accepted objectives of government, the mass ofmen will remain docile for a long time. However, in Germany theirdocility was deeply ruffled. This yearning for order restrained themfor a long time from overt acts of resistance. The revolt was a revolt119

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